The Future is Not a Straight Line
“The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.” — William Gibson.
We have long been conditioned to think of the future as a continuation of the present. Childhood questions like “What do you want to be when you grow up?” suggest that life moves in a straight line. We internalise this early on, thinking, “I want to be a doctor when I grow up”, is the first step on a predictable path.
However, in today’s world, where exponential technologies, global crises, and social shifts collide, the future does not unfold linearly. It bends, breaks, and often accelerates in unpredictable directions.
The Risk of Linear Thinking
Most strategy still assumes a single future: we build forecasts, execute five-year “strategic plans”, and measure progress against expected milestones. This mindset offers comfort but not resilience.
Hamel and Prahalad (1994) warned of “strategic myopia,” a trap where firms become too focused on the known and fail to prepare for what they cannot see. Nassim Taleb (2007) famously argued in The Black Swan that rare, unexpected events have the most significant impact, and yet we routinely fail to account for them in decision-making.
Thinking linearly in a non-linear world can leave us vulnerable to surprises.
Futures and Foresight: A More Useful Mindset
“Futures” generally refers to the mental models and stories we construct about the future. “Foresight” is the process of actively applying tools and methods to explore potential futures and make better-informed decisions in the present. Foresight invites us to consider not one future but many. It is not about predicting the future but rather about exploring multiple possibilities and understanding the forces shaping them. It’s about preparing for what might happen. In the context of organisations, strategic foresight is the ability of an organisation to constantly perceive, make sense of, and act upon ideas about future change emerging in the present.
Scenarios, one of the core tools of strategic foresight, provide structured ways to explore plausible futures. First developed by Herman Kahn and later refined at Royal Dutch Shell, scenarios helped the company navigate oil shocks in the 1970s by anticipating multiple outcomes instead of betting on a single forecast (Wilkinson & Kupers, 2013).
Leaders across industries, from government planning to corporate innovation, use futures and foresight methods to build resilience. The practice empowers organisations to stress-test strategies, uncover blind spots, and create more adaptable plans.
Applying Foresight in Your Personal Life
You can (and should) also practise foresight in your personal life. Although the full process is complex, you can start adopting the mindset with this simple loop:
Look Around You: Identify signals and drivers of change, such as new technologies, emerging behaviours, and global tensions. Foresight starts with awareness.
Imagine What-Ifs: Explore 3 to 5 scenarios. Consider what might happen if today’s trends accelerate, stall, or collide.
Stress-Test Your Plans: Ask whether your current strategies hold up in each of those futures. What would break? What needs to change now? This process is known as wind tunnelling in strategic foresight (van der Heijden, 2005), which involves running plans through simulated futures to see where they fail.
From Fragile to Resilient
The real benefit of applying this mindset is not just better foresight; it is better decisions. By acknowledging uncertainty, we shift from fragile strategies that collapse under change to resilient ones that flex with it.
In an age of disruption, the most thoughtful response is not prediction; it is preparation. The future is not a straight line. Moreover, the more we treat it like one, the more vulnerable we become.
If we want to lead through uncertainty and not just survive it, we must learn to think in futures, not forecasts.
Further Reading
Hamel, G., & Prahalad, C. K. (1994). Competing for the Future. Harvard Business Review Press.
Taleb, N. N. (2007). The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Random House.
van der Heijden, K. (2005). Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. Wiley.
Wilkinson, A., & Kupers, R. (2013). Living in the Futures. Harvard Business Review.
Kahn, H. (1967). The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years. Macmillan.
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